For Fear of the Jews

(Expanded from SOBRANS, September 2002,
pages 36, and taken from a speech given at the IHR Conference held in
Los Angeles, June 2123, 2002.)

Text dropped from the print edition or modified
solely for reasons of space appears in blue.

The news that I would be addressing
the Institute of Historical Review came to some people as ... well, news.
It was mentioned in the Jewish newspaper Forward and on the
Zionist Wall Street Journal Online. The editors of two
conservative magazines called and wrote me to express their concern that I
might damage my reputation, such as it is, by speaking to Holocaust
deniers.

Im
not sure why this should matter. Even positing that I was
speaking to a disreputable audience, I expect to be
judged by what I say, not whom I say it to. I note that
my enemies have written a great deal about me, yet they
rarely quote me directly.

Why not?
If I am so disreputable myself, I must at least
occasionally say disreputable things. Is it possible that
what I say is more cogent than they like to admit?

My enemies
are always welcome to quote anything I say, if they dare.
I would say the same things to them, and they may
consider my remarks to the IHR as addressed to them too.
I wasnt just speaking to Holocaust
deniers, but also to Holocaust believers.

Because
Ive endured smears and ostracism for my criticism
of Israel and its American lobby, some people credit me
with courage. Im flattered, of course, but this
compliment, whether or not I deserve it, implies that
its professionally dangerous for a journalist to
criticize Israel. That tells you a lot.

But if
Im courageous, what do you call Mark
Weber and the Institute for Historical Review? They have
been smeared far worse than I have; moreover, they have
been seriously threatened with death. Their offices have
been firebombed. Do they at least get credit for courage?
Not at all. They remain almost universally vilified.

When I met
Mark, many years ago, I expected to meet a raving
Jew-hating fanatic, such being the generic reputation of
Holocaust deniers. I was immediately and
subsequently impressed to find that he was just the
opposite: a mild-mannered, good-humored, witty, scholarly
man who habitually spoke with restraint and measure, even
about enemies who would love to see him dead. The same
is true of other members of the Institute. In my many
years of acquaintance with them, I have never heard any
of them say anything that would strike an unprejudiced
listener as unreasonable or bigoted.

It was his
enemies who were raving, hate-filled fanatics, unable to
discuss Holocaust deniers in measured
language, without wild hyperbole, loose accusation, and
outright lies. I began to wonder: if they cant tell
the truth about Holocaust deniers, how can
they tell the truth about the Holocaust itself?

Even if
the Holocaust had really happened, as I assumed, maybe it
should be studied with a critical rationality most of its
believers obviously lacked. After all, even Stalins
crimes might be exaggerated, quite understandably, by his
victims. As Milton puts it, Let truth and falsehood
grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free
and open encounter? Even those in error might have
something to say, some marginal clarification to offer.
Why stop our ears against them?

Why on
earth is it anti-Jewish to conclude from the
evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are
inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in
many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial
extermination? Surely these are controversial
conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage. There
is no danger in permitting it to proceed. It might be
different if denying the Holocaust could somehow affect
the course of events, as the denial of Stalins
crimes by the New York Times in the 1930s
helped him to continue committing them. Why is the
Institute for Historical Review notorious, while the
Times, despite its active support of Stalin
at the height of his power, remains a pillar of
respectability?

The
Holocaust has never been a consuming interest of mine.
But as I read the Journal of Historical
Review over the years, I found in it the same calm
virtue of critical rationality Id found in Mark
himself. And it was applied to many other subjects
besides the question of whether Hitler had tried to
exterminate the Jews.

Im especially indebted to one
fascinating article on another taboo subject: Abraham
Lincolns long pursuit of the policy of sending
former Negro slaves outside the United States. This
completely reshaped the book on Lincoln I was writing. I
realized that you cant understand Lincoln unless
you grasp that he waged the Civil War with a dual goal:
to prevent the political separation of North and South,
while achieving the racial separation of whites and
blacks. His dream was a united white America. He was by
no means the color-blind humanitarian we have been taught
to revere.

The
IHRs mission cant be fairly summed up as
Holocaust denial. Its real mission is
criticism of the suffocating progressive ideology that
has infected and distorted the telling of history in our
time. But of course its specific skepticism of the
standard Holocaust story is regarded as blasphemy, and
has earned it the dreaded epithet of anti-
Semitism.

Not long
ago the only label more lethal to ones reputation
was that of child molester, but, as many men of the cloth
are now discovering, there is this difference: a child
molester may hope for a second chance.

There is
also another difference. We have a pretty clear idea what
child molestation is. Nobody really knows what
anti-Semitism is. My old boss Bill Buckley
wrote an entire book called In Search of Anti-
Semitism without bothering to define anti-
Semitism.

At the
time I thought this was an oversight. I was wrong. The
word would lose its utility if it were defined. As I
observed in my own small contribution to the book, an
anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now
it means a man who is hated by Jews.

I doubt,
in fact I cant imagine, that anyone associated with
the IHR has ever done harm to another human being because
he was Jewish. In fact the IHR has never been accused of
anything but thought-crimes.

The same
is true of me. Nobody has ever accused me of the
slightest personal indecency to a Jew. My chief offense,
it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel
has been a costly and treacherous ally to the
United States. As of last September 11, I should think
that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single
apology for having been correct.

If I were
to hate Jews en masse, without distinction, I would be
guilty of many things. Obviously Id be guilty of
injustice and uncharity to Jews as human beings. I would
also be guilty of willful stupidity. More personally,
Id be guilty of ingratitude to my benefactors
 which Dante, in his Inferno, ranks
the worst of all sins  since many of my
benefactors, in large ways and small, have been Jewish

Moreover,
I would be becoming exactly the man my Zionist enemies
would like me to be; a man like them, in whom ethnic
hostilities take priority over all other values and
considerations. I would justify them in treating me as an
enemy. In fact Id go so far as to say that I would
be helping to justify the state of Israel. I consider
that if I fight these people on their terms, they have
already won.

What,
exactly, is anti-Semitism? One standard
dictionary definition is hostility toward or
discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial
group. How this applies to me has never been
explained. My hostility toward Israel is a
desire not for war, but for neutrality  out of a
sense of betrayal, waste, and shame. Our venal
politicians have aligned us with a foreign country that
behaves dishonorably. Most alleged
anti-Semites would wince if Jews anywhere
were treated as Israel treats its Arab subjects.
Moreover, Israel has repeatedly betrayed its only
benefactor, the United States. I have already alluded to
the place Dante reserves for those who betray their
benefactors.

These are
obvious moral facts. Yet its not only politicians
who are afraid to point them out; so are most journalists
 the people who are supposed to be independent
enough to say the things politicians cant afford to
say. In my thirty years in journalism, nothing has amazed
me more than the prevalent fear in the profession of
offending Jews, especially Zionist Jews.

The fear
of the label anti-Semitic is a fear of the power
that is believed to lie behind it: Jewish power. Yet this
is still pretty much unmentionable in journalism.
Its rather as if sportswriters covering pro
basketball were prohibited from mentioning that the Los
Angeles Lakers were in first place.

In my 21 years at National
Review, I had a front-row seat. I watched closely
as Bill Buckley changed from a jaunty critic of Israel to
what I can only call a servile appeaser. In its early
days, the magazine published robust editorials blasting
politicians who sacrificed American to Israeli interests
in order to pander to the Jewish vote; in those days it
was considered risqué to suggest that there was a
Jewish vote. Today Bills magazine
supports Israel with embarrassing sycophancy, never
daring to intimate that Israeli and American interests
may occasionally diverge. It has forgotten its own
principles; today it would never dare to publish the
editorials written by its great geopolitical thinker of
those early days, James Burnham.

There has
been a qualitative change that is downright eerie  not only in Bill Buckley and
National Review, but in American
conservatism generally. The fear of the Jews,
to use the phrase so often repeated in the Gospel
according to John, seems to have wrought a reorientation
of the tone, the very principles, of todays
conservatism. The hardy skepticism, critical
intelligence, and healthy irony of men like James
Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and the young Buckley have
given way to the uncritical philo-Semitism of George
Will, Cal Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and of course the later
Buckley  men who will go to any lengths, even
absurd and dishonorable lengths, to avoid the terrorizing
label anti-Semite.

It was
once considered anti-Semitic to impute
dual loyalty to Jews  that is, to
assert that most American Jews divide their loyalty
between the United States and Israel. This is now
passé. Today most politicians assume, as a matter of
course, that Israel commands the primary loyalty
of Jewish voters. Are they accused of
anti-Semitism for doing so? Does this
assumption cost them Jewish votes? Not at all! Dual
loyalty nothing! Dual loyalty would be an improvement!

Once
again, its a practical necessity to know
what it would be professional suicide to say. No
politician in his right mind would accuse Jews of giving
their primary loyalty to Israel; but most politicians act
as if this were the case. And they succeed.

You can
read Jewish publications like Commentary for
years, and youll read interminable discussions
about whats good for Israel, but youll never
encounter the slightest suggestion that whats good
for Israel might not be good for America. The possibility
simply never comes up. The only discernible duty of Jews,
it seems, is to look out for Israel. They never have to
choose between Israel and the United States. So much for
the canard of dual loyalty.

The very word anti-Semite is
reminiscent of the term anti-Soviet. It serves a
similar function of facilitating imputations of
ill-defined guilt.

The
strength of Western law has always been its insistence on
definition. When we want to minimize an offense, say
murder or burglary, we define it as clearly as possible.
We want judge and jury to know exactly what the charge
means, not only to convict the guilty but, also, just as
important, to protect the innocent.

Clear
definitions put a burden of proof on the accuser, and
properly so. If you falsely accuse a man of murder or
burglary, not only is he apt to be acquitted  you
may pay a heavy penalty yourself. As a result, few of us
are afraid of being charged with murders and burglaries
we didnt commit.

By
contrast, the Soviet legal system left prosecutors with a
wide discretion in identifying anti-Soviet
activities. Almost anything irritating to the Soviet
state could qualify. An impossible burden of proof lay on
the accused; guilt was presumed; acquittals were
virtually nonexistent. To be indicted was already to be
convicted. Since the charge was undefined, it was
unfalsifiable; there was no such thing as a false
accusation. As a result, the Russian population lived in
fear.

The word
anti-Semitic functions like the word
anti-Soviet. Being undefined, its
unfalsifiable. Loose charges of anti-Semitism
are common, but nobody suffers any penalty for making
them, since what is unfalsifiable can never be shown to
be false. I once read an article in a Jewish magazine
that called the first Star Wars movie anti-
Semitic. I was amazed, but I couldnt prove
the contrary. Who could? And of course people in public
life  and often in private life  fear
incurring the label, however guiltless they may be.

If you
want to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty,
you define crimes precisely. If, however, you merely want
to maximize the number of convictions, increase the power
of the accusers, and create an atmosphere of dread, you
define crimes as loosely as possible. We now have an
incentive system that might have been designed to promote
loose charges of anti-Semitism.

Silly as
all this is from a rational point of view, the label of
anti-Semitism is deeply feared. It does signify
one thing: Jewish hatred. When I became a conservative as
a college freshman, in 1965, nearly all Jews were
liberals and Jewish intellectuals associated conservatism
with anti-Semitism. Bill Buckley was often
depicted as a fascist or crypto-Nazi; given the smears he
endured, its understandable that he should go to
great lengths to appear pro-Jewish, even if he somewhat
overdid it by abetting smears of his fellow
conservatives.

The
situation changed somewhat when many Jewish
intellectuals, upset by liberal criticism of Israel,
became what were called neoconservatives.
This term implied no deep adherence to conservative
principles, but only the adoption of a few ad hoc
principles useful to Zionism, with no basic departure
from New Deal liberalism insofar as it was useful to
Zionism. Neoconservatism was really a sort of
kosher conservatism.

A few
incidents from my years at National Review may illustrate
the point.

In the mid
1980s, the neoconservative Earth Mother Midge Decter,
wife of Norman Podhoretz, accused Russell Kirk of
anti-Semitism. Kirks offense? He had
made a mild quip that some neoconservatives appeared to
believe that the capital of Western civilization was Tel
Aviv. Never mind that he had a point. Kirk had been a
founding father of modern conservatism and a
National Review columnist for many years,
yet the magazine not only failed to rally to his defense
against this smear  it didnt even report the
incident! Decters attack was the biggest news of
the season in the conservative movement, but Buckley was
afraid to mention it. So was most of the conservative
press.

At about
the same time, Israeli troops shot up a Catholic Church
on the West Bank during Mass  a horrible sacrilege
that sent worshipers fleeing for their lives and provoked
an angry protest from the Vatican. (The congregation had
planned a march after Mass to protest the beating of a
Palestinian priest by Israeli soldiers.) I mentioned the
incident to Buckley, a fellow Catholic, at an editorial
meeting and gave him a news clipping describing the event
in detail; as I expected, the magazine ignored this too.
Even the violent persecution of Catholics by Jews was
unmentionable  in a conservative
magazine owned and run by a Catholic.

When the
Pollard spy case broke, the magazine called for the death
penalty for Pollard  but excused Israel for
sponsoring him, on grounds that its normal for
friendly nations to spy on each other!

And so it
went. I could have understood a favorable attitude toward
Israel, having been pro-Israel for many years myself; but
surely even this alliance must have occasional drawbacks.
From time to time its necessary to criticize even
friends. If we criticized our own government every week,
why not Israel once in a while? But the magazine
consistently refused to find the slightest fault with
Israel, and since I left in 1993 it has gotten much
worse. Today it has become assertively slavish, to a
comical degree.

By 1993
Id had enough. I wrote a column correcting some of
the things Bill had written about me, in which I
mentioned his evident fear; I wrote that he was
jumpy about Jews. This was a pretty mild
description of his terror, but the column got me fired,
just as I expected. Since then it has become a
neoconservative legend that I was fired for
anti-Semitism, but the truth is that it was
far more personal than that. Bill knew me too well to
make such a charge. I was fired for making him look bad.
He considered making others look bad his prerogative.

Since
then Ive noticed how eager and desperate
mainstream conservatives are to avoid Jewish wrath.
Again, they dont just speak favorably of Israel;
they refuse to acknowledge any cost to American interests
in the U.S.-Israel alliance. They treat the two
countries interests as identical; when they scold
either government, its always 
always  the U.S. Government for failing to
support our reliable ally. They are in
headlong flight from reality. They have none of the
realism of James Burnham, whose writings and style of
thought would be wholly unwelcome in todays
conservative movement.

They are
frightened. You can sense this in their bluster, in the
vicarious jingoism with which they address Israel. Their
fear produces a peculiar intellectual thinness that
pervades all their thinking on foreign policy. Gone is the critical intelligence that
used to set the tone for such earlier conservative
writers as Burnham, Kendall, Kirk, Whittaker Chambers,
Frank Meyer, Thomas Molnar, and the other distinguished
names that used to grace the masthead of National
Review. Individualists have been replaced
by apparatchiks. Zionism has infiltrated conservatism in
much the same way Communism once infiltrated liberalism.

I notice that Bill Buckleys
latest book is a novel about the Nuremberg trials. Over
the past few years Bill has made a habit of commemorating
the Holocaust with remarkable frequency. He has dropped
references to Auschwitz into countless of his syndicated
columns and interviews, as if compelled to banish the
slightest suspicion that he has any doubts about the
Holocaust or that he doesnt feel deeply about it.
The Holocaust seems to have joined, or supplanted, the
Gulag Archipelago in his historical memory.

Since I
vividly remember the days when Bill regarded the Jews and
Israel not with hostility, but with a healthy and playful
irony  the same attitude he brought to politics in
general  I find all this solemnity pretty
cloying.

Here I
should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven
forbid, a Holocaust denier. I lack the
scholarly competence to be one. I dont read German,
so I cant assess the documentary evidence; I
dont know chemistry, so I cant discuss
Zyklon-B; I dont understand the logistics of
exterminating millions of people in small spaces.
Besides, Holocaust denial is illegal in many
countries I may want to visit someday. For me,
thats proof enough. One Israeli writer has
expressed his amazement at the idea of criminalizing
opinions about historical fact, and I find it puzzling
too; but the state has spoken.

Of course
those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about
the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent
subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told
by the authorities. In every controversy, most people
care much less for what the truth is than for which side
its safer and more respectable to take. They shy
away from taking a position that is likely to get them
into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were
accused of war crimes after World War II, only people
critical of Jewish interests are accused of
thought-crimes in todays mainstream press.

So, life
being as short as it is, I shy away from this
controversy. Of course Im also incompetent to judge
whether the Holocaust did happen; so Ive become
what might be called a Holocaust stipulator.
Like a lawyer who doesnt want to get bogged down
debating a secondary point, I stipulate that the
standard account of the Holocaust is true. What is
undisputed  the massive violation of human rights
in Hitlers Germany  is bad enough.

What
interests me is the growth of what Norman Finkelstein has
called the Holocaust Industry. True or not,
the Holocaust story has been put to many uses, some of
them mischievous. It is currently being used to extort
reparations and to blacken reputations, for example.
Daniel Goldhagen is soon to publish a book blaming the
Holocaust on the central teachings of the Catholic
Church. This is only the most ambitious project of a
school of thought, largely but not exclusively Jewish,
that sees Christianity as the source of all
anti-Semitism.

So if you
want to avoid being called anti-Semitic, the
safest course is to renounce Christianity. Whether this
is a safe course for your immortal soul is a question
Goldhagen doesnt address. The important thing is to
avoid Jewish censure. Obviously this sort of thinking
presupposes Christian fear of the Jews. Jews themselves
are not unaware of Jewish power; some of them have rather
exaggerated confidence in it.

But the
chief use of the Holocaust story is to undergird the
legitimacy of the state of Israel. According to this
view, the Holocaust proves that Jewish existence is
always in danger, unless the Jews have their own state in
their own homeland. The Holocaust stands as the
historical objectification of all the worlds
gentiles eternal anti-Semitism. Jewish
life is an endless emergency, requiring endless emergency
measures and justifying everything does in the name of
defense. Jews and Israel cant be judged
by normal standards, at least until Israel is absolutely
safe  if even then. Their circumstances are forever
abnormal.

But the
daily news reports suggest that Israel may not really be
the safest place for Jews. Theodore Herzls original
dream was of a Jewish state where Jews could at last live
the normal lives they were denied in the Diaspora. Yet
today its Diaspora Jews who live relatively normal
lives, at least in the West, while they must worry about
the very survival of Israel. And far from being the
independent state Herzl hoped for, Israel depends heavily
on the support not only of Diaspora Jews but of foreign
gentiles, especially Americans.

Israel
insists that its right to exist is nothing
more than the right of every nation on earth to be left
in peace. This right is allegedly threatened by fanatical
Arabs who want to drive the Jews into the
sea, as witness the recent wave of Palestinian
terror. But in truth, Israels claimed right
to exist is much more than it seems at first sight.
It means a right to rule as Jews, enjoying
rights denied to native Palestinians.

We are
told incessantly that Israel is a democracy,
and therefore the natural ally of the United States,
whose democratic values it shares. This is a
very dubious claim. To Americans, democracy means
majority rule, but with equal rights for minorities. In
Israel and the occupied territories, equal rights for the
minority are simply out of the question.

Majority
rule itself has taken a peculiar form in Israel. The
original Arab majority was driven out of their homes and
their native land, and kept out. Meanwhile, a Jewish
majority was artificially imported. Not only
the first immigrants from Eastern Europe, but every Jew
on earth was granted a right of return 
that is, return to a homeland
most have never lived in, and in which none of their
ancestors has ever lived. A Jew from Brooklyn (whose
grandfather came from Poland) can fly to Israel and
immediately claim rights denied to an Arab whose people
have always lived in Palestine. In recent years Israel
has been augmenting its Jewish majority by vigorously
encouraging Jewish immigration, especially from Russia.
Ariel Sharon has told a group of American senators that
Israel needs a million more Jewish immigrants.

In recent negotiations, Israel has
flatly rejected demands for a right of return
for Palestinians exiled since 1948. It frankly gave as
its reason that this would mean the end of the
Jewish state, since an Arab majority would surely
vote down Jewish ethnic privileges. If Israel remained
democratic, it wouldnt long remain Jewish.

This
confirms the contention of hard-line Revisionist Zionists
from Vladimir Jabotinsky to Meir Kahane that in the long
run, Israel must be either Jewish or democratic; it
cant be both. And in order to remain Jewish, it
must reject the equal rights for its minorities that Jews
everywhere demand where they are a minority. Israel must
be the only democracy whose existence
depends on inequality.

Put
otherwise, Zionism is a denial of the
self-evident truths of the Declaration of
Independence. To acknowledge those truths, and to put
them into practice, would mean the end of Israel as a
Jewish state. Again, honest and rigorous Zionists have
always seen and said this.

American
gentiles, bemused by the propaganda claim that a
beleaguered little democracy is fighting for its very
right to exist, are vaguely baffled, unable to comprehend
what is before their eyes. They still havent
figured out that Israeli democracy is
essentially and radically different from  even
repugnant to  what they understand as
democracy.

With the
verbal sleight-of-hand at which they are masters, the
Israelis always appeal to the Holocaust. Maybe they have
nuclear weapons, but their existence is threatened 
once more!  by rock-throwing Arab boys. The Arabs
are the new Nazis, repeating and perpetuating the eternal
peril of the Jews. Israel is determined to prevent
another Holocaust and must crush the Arab threat by any
means necessary, including harsh measures.

Israel
without the Holocaust is hard to imagine. But lets
try to imagine it.

Suppose
the Holocaust had never occurred, had never been alleged,
had never been called the Holocaust.
Imagine that no great persecution had provided the Jewish
state with a special excuse for oppressive emergency
measures. In other words, imagine that Israel were forced
to justify itself like any other state.

In that
case, Israels treatment of its Arab minorities
would appear to the world in a very different light. Its
denial of equal or even basic rights to those minorities
would lack the excuse of a past or prospective
Holocaust. Civilized people would expect it
to treat those it ruled with impartial justice
 like civilized states.
Special privileges for Jews would appear as outrageous
discrimination, no different from insulting legal
discrimination against Jews. The sense 
and excuse  of perpetual crisis would be absent.
Israel might be forced or pressured, possibly against its
will, to be normal. If it chose to be
democratic, its Jews would have to take their chance of
being outnumbered, just like majorities in other
democracies. Nobody would suppose that losing elections
would mean their annihilation.

In short,
the Holocaust has become a device for exempting Jews from
normal human obligations. It has authorized them to bully
and blackmail, to extort and oppress. This is all quite
irrational, because even if six million Jews were
murdered during World War II, it
doesnt follow that the survivors are entitled to
commit the slightest injustice. If your father was
stabbed in the street, thats a pity, but its
not an excuse for picking someone elses pocket.

In a
peculiar way, the Holocaust story has promoted not only
pity, but actual fear of the Jews. It has removed them
from the universe of normal moral discourse. It has made
them victims with nukes. It has made them even more
dangerous than their enemies have always charged. It has
given the world an Israel ruled by Ariel Sharon.

Benjamin
Netanyahu has written that Israel is an integral
part of the West. I think it would be truer to say
that Israel has become a deformed limb of the West.

Joseph Sobran

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